DOK Leipzig 2022

Four prizes were awarded to new documentary projects participation in this year’s DOK Co-Pro Market. Additionally from the DOK Preview Germany showcase, the D-Facto Motion Works-in-Progress Prize was awarded, and from the DOK Short n’ Sweet selection the Square Eyes Festival Consultation Awarded was handed out.

Constructed from home videos from the 1990s and early 2000s, Love Is Not An Orange, which world-premiered in Leipzig, paints a fascinating portrait of the impact independence had on Moldova, formerly part of the Soviet Union, a country that struggled to make the transition from communism to capitalism, and all seen through the prism of family relationships.

Gereon Wetzel and Melanie Liebheit’s kitchen-based documentary is satisfyingly unusual in its choice of subject. Whereas filmmakers generally focus on the head chef in a restaurant, theirs follows the apprentice chef Agnes, highly talented but very much at the bottom of the food chain. Wetzel and Liebheit serve up answers to Business Doc Europe.

Heinz Emigholz’ multi-layered and meditative architectural essay Slaughterhouses of Modernity juxtaposes literal modernist slaughterhouses in Argentina from the 1930s with the newly built replica of the Berliner Schloss and the triumphant works of Bolivian architect Freddy Mamani. The question is: who or what is being slaughtered here?

The top award in the German Competition was given to Dead Birds Flying High, while the Audience Award went to Three Women. Following the week-long festival which concluded October 23, a selection of the award-winning films will be shown online throughout Germany in the DOK Stream from 24 to 30 October.

Elizabeth Klinck can justly be called one of the doyennes of the film archive world. She will be at DOK Leipzig for the inaugural edition of the DOK Archive Market, kicking off today, Oct 20, where she will also be chairing case studies and a masterclass. Before all that, she took time to expound on her life in the sector with BDE.  

When Dr Adelheid Heftberger spoke to Business Doc Europe, it was just a few hours after her keynote speech last week at Leipzig’s DOK Archive market. “I wanted to explain a little bit the position of film archive in terms of access, and what happens in the background,” Heftberger [Head of Film Access, film dept of the German Bundesarchiv in Berlin] said of her address to the professional audience.

You won’t find many bigger collections at DOK Leipzig Archive market than that of Sweden’s SVT Archives. It has over 400,000 hours of material in its vaults. Some of this is very recent. Some dates right back to the birth of cinema in 1896. Maria Bergmark talks Business Doc Europe through the SVT offer. “It’s not just from Sweden but from all over the world,” she says.

Submerged hints of suffering slowly surface in Faustine Cros’ absorbing and gently moving, and deftly insightful, A Life Like Any Other (Une vie comme une autre) as she uses archival material shot by her filmmaker father, as well as her own intimate interviews, to delve into her mother’s barely noticed depression that ultimately led to a suicide attempt that traumatised the entire family.

The UK-based Imperial War Museums will be on the front line during DOK Leipzig’s Archive Market, representing a collection with 25,000 hours of moving images. “People think of us as a military collection but really our collection reflects life in the 20th and early 21st century,” Film Curator Fiona Kelly tells BDE. “We’re trying to get people to think of us a resource for social and cultural history as well as military history.”